YMMV / A Different Lesson

• Complete Monster:
  • Chao is a sadistic dark chi user. In the past, he slaughtered an entire class of young kung fu students at the Jade Palace and killed his former friends, with only Oogway surviving. Upon being freed in the present, he painfully possesses Vachir—leaving his soul in helpless residence—and murders at least 50 people, including children, and displays their corpses to get Tai Lung to face him. He corrupts the Sacred Pool to control everyone in the Valley, creating a Kangaroo Court and a mob to hunt down Tai Lung when he's put on trial for a murder he's been framed for. He forces Monkey to seemingly kill Mantis, causing him overwhelming guilt. To enrich his dark chi, Chao hangs a couple on grappling hooks to bleed out while their son's gutted body is between them. While he was imprisoned, his soul helped drive Tai Lung into committing his rampage, as well as keeping him focused on revenge and claiming the Dragon Scroll while the snow leopard was held in Chorh-Gom. Betraying Xiu in the end despite her unwavering loyalty, Chao was a sadist who wanted to live forever and force his vision of perfection on the world.
  • Xiu is Chao's death-loving Psycho Supporter who desires to be the best assassin in her empire. She killed her own father for being "weak" and framed it on her sister, Jia, making her a wanted criminal. Xiu twisted and manipulated Jia into serving her as an assassin who believed her father's death was her fault. She poisoned countless soldiers who had been fighting the Huns and caused others to abandon or betray China just to avoid that fate. Upon being discovered as a traitor, she murdered her kung fu master and fled. She tried to manipulate Tai Lung into joining her with lies about his family, including planting doubts regarding Shifu and Oogway's love and pride in him. She kidnaps and traumatizes Ping, kills Zhuang and frames Tai Lung for it, and makes multiple attempts to kill Po and Tigress. She is willing to let her sisters die to achieve her goals, and after they start having second thoughts and try to resist her, she is determined to kill them when she no longer needs them anymore.
• Foe Romance Subtext: Heian Chao is just a little too obsessed with Tai Lung and making him his own, whether the snow leopard wants it or not… Apparently it's noticeable enough for even Emotionless Girl Chun to remark on it: "Don't worry, we'll keep [Jia] well away from him. Wouldn't want to interfere with your own plans to have the stud all to yourself."
• Fridge Brilliance:
  • Chao is the perfect antagonist for Tai Lung. Why? Through corrupting and manipulating his chi, he intends to ‘take Tai Lung’s self away’. Not only is that at the heart of kung fu philosophy, it’s the problem Tai Lung had all along, not believing in himself so that he felt he would be nothing without the Dragon Scroll. Ergo, take away his self, and he’d immediately be back to the monster he was before.
  • Thanks to the species of the characters involved, any time Tigress is facing one of the Wu Sisters it's a literal Cat Fight. However, every single one of those encounters is taken absolutely serious and is a deadly, legitimate battle rather than fanservice or amusing bickering (although a bit of the latter does precede the Tigress/Xiu combat in the birch forest). The same also holds true for Mei Ling vs. Jia during the Final Battle, and her earlier fight with all three of the Wu Sisters. Objectification of women defied!
  • How exactly Tai Lung's accent and slang ended up in ancient China is mostly left unaddressed in the same way the movie itself doesn't explain why Tai Lung would have a British accent in the first place. However, in one of the sequel vignettes the author does reveal the snow leopard picked up the accent when visiting the Imperial City in an attempt to come off as more erudite and elite, suggesting it's a Translation Convention to imply high-culture Mandarin is what's being employed as opposed to what the common peasant folk would have been using...which makes the vulgarity even funnier in retrospect, though not exactly unrealistic, since there is plenty of ancient Chinese writing which indicates nobles and other upper class members were not above coarse language or crass insults when the need arose. Humorously, and intriguingly, it's entirely possible Tai Lung could have picked up the slang as well as the accent while visiting the Imperial City specifically if there had been British subjects there at the time, whether diplomats in the palace or sailors at the docks, but since the vignettes also establish this iteration of the Kung Fu Panda universe as taking place during the Ming Dynasty, that option isn't available.
  • In the author's version of events, the Wuxi Finger Hold has two possible results, either killing and utterly obliterating the one it is used upon or cleansing and purifying them so they have a chance at redemption. Shifu claims there is a third usage "we never talk about", which was meant by Word of God as just a Rule of Three / Rule of Funny gag, but after Kung Fu Panda 3 came out and revealed the hold's canonical result is to send the one it is used on bodily into the Spirit Realm, it's entirely possible the canonical result could be the same as this third unknown result. Even more interestingly, if all three are included it matches up rather well with the elements of the Chinese taijitu: destruction would fit aggressive Yang, Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence would fit passive Yin, while continuing to live but with a spiritual rebirth that would let the target reconsider their life and try to atone for their mistakes would be something of a halfway point between the two, and thus could be considered balance.
  • The voice the author chose to portray Wu Xuan, if the fic were to be animated, was Chris Evans. The reader is first introduced to him at the end of the novel as a spirit with all the nobility, warmth, wry downplayed humor, and determination to do the right thing one would expect for the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Captain America, and this only carries through into flashback scenes in the vignettes where he is shown doing all in his power to convince Jia and Chun to perform Heel Face Turns or at least do all they can to pull Xiu back from the brink of damnation. But when further flashbacks are made to his youth as a Bash Brother with Qiao Yong, he turns out to have been brash and a bit cocky, a naughty-minded jokester, and not always the best role model for heroism...which fits pretty well Evans' portrayal of Johnny Storm.
• Harsher in Hindsight: According to Word of God, an appropriate voice for Hai the elephant would be Dianne Wiest. This is the woman who, as the Evil Queen of The 10th Kingdom, spoke the line, "If I hear one whisper, one rumor, that anything is amiss, I will kill your children in front of you." This is precisely what happened to poor Hai herself.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Being written and completed so shortly after the first film was released, there are a number of moments in the story that seem to predict events that happen in future installments of the franchise.
  • When Tai Lung is attempting to 'lighten the mood' on the way to Chorh-Gom by helping Tigress and Shifu reconcile, Tigress has this to say: "And since when have you become an expert on entertainment and leisure? Did you take up clowning when I wasn't looking?" No...but as she'll discover, Ping has◊. (And now that that image is in your head, just try and keep from imagining Tai Lung doing and saying all the things the goose did when Tigress was sick.)
  • In Chapter 38, Tai Lung's thoughts: "No one needed to know he'd been so caught up in romancing Tigress he might not have noticed if Po had started dressing up in a cheongsam. Oh gods...why did I have to go there? Someone kill me now, please...or at least murder my imagination." Well it may not be a cheongsam, but we have gotten to see Po dressed as a woman in "Ladies of the Shade". And Tai Lung's reaction is pretty apt.
  • On a related note, one of the members of the aforementioned Ladies of the Shade is a violet-eyed snow leopardess who is nominally on the side of the bad guys, performs a Heel–Face Turn to help fight her former allies, and has a Ship Tease with Po. This sounds remarkably similar to Jia.
  • Monkey getting put under Mind Control (with Red Eyes, Take Warning), something which was utterly Played for Drama (and horror) in the fic, becomes a lot funnier after seeing "The Scorpion's Sting".
  • The Big Bad is a dark master of chi who used to be allied with Master Oogway, but was eventually corrupted by his lust for power, leading Oogway to seal him away until he finally made his return centuries later, after Oogway's death. Sounds an awful lot like Kai, doesn't it? For that matter, the fact that the Big Bad is a bird also becomes amusing considering the Big Bad of the sequel.
  • The third movie also has a moment where a panda dons Master Flying Rhino's armor (and which Po himself admitted to fantasizing about), and the statues of the Vault of Heroes appearing uncovered and open on the mountain around the stairs... And considering both Heian Chao and Kai are spirits, it's surely the case that Chao was also immune to the Wuxi Finger Hold, which makes Tai Lung warning Po not to use it incredibly prescient. It's a good thing the possibilities he suggested never happened with Kai, isn't it?
    Tai Lung: Just what d'you suppose would happen if you used the ultimate chi move on the ultimate master of chi? The least that would happen is it blowing up in your face and doing absolutely nothing. Worse, you might just make him stronger...or allow him to turn it back on you, corrupt you, vaporize you...
  • Another more minor point of amusement: in the author's about me page, he notes that the voice he had in mind for Bao (Po's father in this fanfiction) was Bryan Cranston. Out comes Kung Fu Panda 3, and guess who Po's canon father is voiced by?
  • An internal example: in Chapter 24, when Tai Lung is disparaging Viper's romance advice at how seemingly contradictory it all is, the snow leopard bitterly snarks, "Why don't you ask me to hold back the floodwaters of the Huang He all by myself then, while you're at it?" Flash-forward to the sequel vignettes, when (at least by implication) Po managed to do exactly that with his Water chi.
• Ho Yay: Very much unintentional, but some might see this for Mantis/Monkey and Zhuang/Tai Lung, as well as Tai Lung and Po.
• Les Yay: There seems to be a bit of this between Chun and Tigress in the final fight.
• Moe: Nearly every child in the story, including Tai Lung, but Yi especially stands out.
• Moral Event Horizon: Though no one was planning to nominate either of them for sainthood, Xiu’s murder of Zhuang and Chao first killing children and then his fellow masters both made them utterly irredeemable and had readers crying out for their blood.
• Nausea Fuel: The zombie Anvil of Heaven.
• One-Scene Wonder: Ning Guo the apothecary.
• Strawman Has a Point: Most of the naysayers, from Tigress to the various villagers, have rather good points regarding the possibility of accepting Tai Lung back into the Valley, either based on him truly having done reprehensible things which need to be acknowledged and punished or by raising very legitimate fears that such a thing could happen again if he did not learn to control his temper or wasn't truly attempting to redeem himself. While Chang and Xiulan fill such roles, Vachir in particular has a number of points since not only did he lose family members as the others did, he was actually the legitimate authority in charge of imprisoning and punishing the snow leopard. Even the fact that Chang was a misogynist, Xiulan a rather self-righteous and narrow-minded shrew of a wife, and Vachir was revealed to be a torturous bully (and that the latter two both got possessed and manipulated into truly heinous acts by Chao) did not change the ultimate sensibility of some of their points—something which Tai Lung himself acknowledged as he struggled to change, prove himself, and remain true to his new path. Deliberate and intentional by Word of God as part of the fic's Gray-and-Grey Morality.
• Tear Jerker:
  • A number of them, but mainly Zhuang's death and subsequent funeral.
  • Vachir's final moment, one of the most powerful moments in the fic!
  • Any scene where Monkey is feeling guilty for killing Mantis.